The present invention relates to the processing of information requiring human attention to or interaction with an operations support system, such as the customer care associated with an electronic billing system. More specifically, the present invention relates to partitioning jobs requiring human attention or interaction into stateless tasks.
Known computer-based operations support systems, such as the customer care systems associated with an electronic billing system, frequently generate jobs which require human attention or interaction to resolve. These operations support systems will generate a list of such jobs which are then distributed to human agents for action.
Often, these jobs cannot be completed by a single human operator in a single attempt within a predictable time. Several reasons can exist to prevent a human operator from completing a job in a single attempt. For example, required data may be unavailable for a substantial period of time thereby necessitating the human operator to wait for the required data and then to continue processing the job at that later point in time.
Known computer-based operations support systems and especially those which serve customer care applications suffer from several shortcomings. Because a human operator must suspend processing of a job until certain required data becomes available, either the original human operator must resume processing of that job or else another human operator must obtain the preliminary data and results from the original human operator before resuming processing of that job. Of course, when the original human operator must resume processing of the job, an unnecessary and costly delay in completing the processing of the job potentially is introduced. For example, the human operator may be too busy processing other jobs to obtain and process the newly available data. The human operator may even forget to obtain and process the newly available required data, potentially for a substantial period of time. Consequently, efficiency, predictable performance, and minimized cost are hard to achieve.
Alternatively, for a subsequent human operator to process the job originally processed by another human operation, the subsequent human operator must obtain preliminary data and results from the original human operator. Transferring the preliminary data and results to the subsequent human operator unnecessarily delays processing of the job, creates opportunity for error, and wastes the time of both human operators.
The present invention partitions jobs or xe2x80x9cinformation technologyxe2x80x9d work items into a queue of stateless tasks each of which can be completed by the same or a different human operator in a planned and predictable time. Any human operator can handle any task because each task is stateless, i.e., complete unto itself.
The present invention can optimally define the stateless tasks to be reusable when possible so that execution of tasks can be performed in an economically efficient manner. The present invention can recursively examine each job step associated with a task to identify standard job steps that are repeated and can be reused. Such reusable elements can then be implemented with special efficiency.
The present invention can be applied to jobs Which require data not immediately available to the agent presented with the job. Each job is partitioned into stateless tasks by marking each job with at least one task divider. Each task divider indicates a place where required data is unavailable or where a check should be made to determine whether the required data has become available. At each place in the job where a task divider is placed, state information is preserved, a task which tests for availability of the required data is created, and the task is entered into an execution queue or an alert table. The execution queue can be a queue of a processor where jobs are buffered for immediate execution; each job is executed when a processor is available to process the job. The alert table can be a deterministic delayed queue where jobs are buffered for a specified period of time; when the specified delay period of time for a corresponding job has expired, the job is moved to the execution queue for immediate execution.
The alert table can include an identification of each task entered into the alert table and a time interval indicating when each task in the alert table is to enter the execution queue.
The jobs can be, for example, the class of customer care activities associated with responses to rejected transactions returned by a payments system which is engaged to process deferred charge transactions against credit or debit accounts. The human operator can be a customer care agent.